12/01/2013   English German

  Edition # 104  
San Francisco, 12-01-2013


Figure [1]: The grocery store chain Whole Foods prefers new locations near ugly new buildings.

Angelika When I was a teenager, I loved a German book with a title that roughly translates to "Here's a house being demolished, there's a construction crane and the bulldozer beckons, or: Changes in the city" and was written by Jörg Müller und Heinz Ledergerber. It's a picture book, illustrating the appalling construction changes happening over the course of time in a once beautiful city. It first shows almost unnoticable small changes, but towards the end, everything is covered with concrete. To get an impression of what I'm referring to, check out the Youtube video "Changes in the City".

When I'm walking around San Francisco latetly, I get the feeling that very similar changes are happening here, and to my horror, they're reminding me of the illustrations in the old book. There's a newly fueled construction frenzy under way in San Francisco these days, and you could get the impression that the architects designing the new buildings were all spat out from a college class titled "How to build boring and identical looking eyesores costing exorbitant amounts of money". Large parts of Market Street, winding through various parts of San Francisco, are under construction, from the Embarcadero at the Bay, through the inner city and later in the Castro and Twin Peaks neigborhoods.

Although Market Street is one of the major arteries of San Francisco's downtown district, it features a surprising number of stretches that are badly run-down. Especially the part between Civic Center (where the government buildings are) and Powell Street (where the cable car departs) takes some time to get used to. There's homeless people, red light theaters, and most of the shops were looking somewhat dubiously until recently. Since we've been living in the area, there's always been plans to clean up this stretch and make it prettier. The first few steps in this direction looked promising, parts of Market Street were closed for through traffic in 2009, and bike lanes were added. But ever since, one glass window monster building after another has been erected there, and some of the charme of many of San Francisco's hidden corners was lost forever.

Figure [2]: Another Whole Foods in an ugly new building.

There's no doubt that San Francisco urgently needs more living space, but the mushrooming tacky new luxury silos resemble hotel towers, and so are outrageously expensive, so that only hipsters and techies working for the various companies in Silicon Valley, located 30 miles south of San Francisco, can afford them. Many don't want to live down there, though, where one faceless town borders the next, featuring only shopping centers, dreary housing complexes, and freeways.

For this reason, many in San Francisco curse the so-called "Google Bus Syndrome". Michael has mentioned in a previous edition, that the big companies in Silicon Valley offer lots of perks for their employees. One of them is that they're running big luxury coaches, called shuttles, which are picking up employees of Yahoo, Google, Apple, or Genentech in the morning in San Francisco, and are taking them back home again at night (Rundbrief 04/2007). This is both convenient for the commuters and effective for the companies, as employees can start working on their laptops on the bus, instead of sitting behind the wheel. By itself, that's a commendable idea, which helps saving the environment, since a bus seats many more people than a car and causes less pollution than everyone driving by themselves. As a side effect, however, these buses cause the rents to increase in the neighborhoods they frequent, because many tech workers value the fact that all they need to do in the morning is walk a few blocks to board a shuttle that is driving them straight away to work.

Figure [3]: Traditional houses in San Francisco: This is what the neighborhood looked like when we moved here.

Figure [4]: New building on Duboce Street: Again the dreaded architectural blandness.

On average, in San Francisco, rent is up about 20% from last year. The above mentioned housing complexes on the corner of Market and Dolores Street charge almost $3,000 a month for a studio (that's a single room appartment with built-in kitchen) and $3,500 for a one bedroom appartment. A two bedroom appartment goes for $3,800 and a three bedroom for a whopping $8,000. On city-wide average, a two bedroom apparment currently rents for about $3,400. That's changing the landscape significantly, because there's more and more people from the so-called middle class who can't afford to live in San Francisco anymore and are forced to move someplace else. Especially families with kids are leaving. In the meantime, the pressure increases on the mayor and the city council, because no one wants to live in a city without kids or seniors, or people with professions supporting the city, like firemen, policemen, nurses, teachers, retail sales people, or garbage collectors. No one working in these fields can currently afford to live in San Francisco anymore.

Figure [5]: In the "Dogpatch" Neighborhood: All new buildings look the same.

The city even forces homebuilders to create 12% of all newly built units as low cost housing. Builders can choose whether to build those themselves or pay a fee to the city, which then steps in and does it for them. With this rule in place, a total of 21 million dollars has been accumulated, but it's of no help if the city just keeps sitting on it. In the meantime, with my salary, appartments within city limits have moved out of reach for me, despite the fact that I'm working full time. Many of my colleagues are living with their parents or share a space with a group of people for the same reason.

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